All the Land to Hold Us (34 page)

He slept peacefully right until the end of his nap, when he dreamed that he had lost all the money he had earned—that he had gone swimming in the river and it had floated out, gotten wet and deteriorated, simply vanished—and he sat up in terror, felt frantically for the money and, even after discovering it was still with him, had trouble calming his heart.

He rose and followed the river downstream, eventually passing by the ford where George Waller had spied and caught the great fish. He observed the tire tracks where the brigade of jeeps had crossed the shallow water, bruising the white limestone and its thin sheet of algae, and paused to watch a swarming school of tiny catfish, black as ink, the underwater cloud of them drifting in writhing nucleus downstream, the entire school of them ravenous, just hatched. Some would be eaten by crows and belted kingfishers, others by shrikes and frogs and turtles and raccoons. Others of them would be charmed, and might go on to live for several years. One in ten thousand of them, or one in a hundred thousand, might go on to become giants; or perhaps none at all, perhaps never again.

He patted the money in his pocket, shifted the heft of his rucksack to reassure himself that that prize was there, too, and marveled at all that could happen in the world in only a few days. Still, he had decided that he did not care to work for Sy Craven, or any of the others—not anywhere, not ever again—though the wealth he had gotten from the last three days' work would last him and his family for weeks.

The lullaby of the river and the sound of the leaves rattling in the breeze above conspired to help him forget, for a while, his betrayal of the fish, and by the time he arrived back at his village that evening, where his family was astounded by the sudden wealth, he felt properly hardened, sufficiently encased and rigid against the possibility of that memory ever returning with its full emotional debts and obligations. A man, already.

 

It wasn't so much that Richard kept dreaming of Clarissa—only occasionally, once a year or so, would she return to him in his sleeping dreams—but, more problematic, thoughts of her invaded his waking moments, quiet moments that should have been filled with peace and forward-looking.

He wanted in no way to become one of those wrecks of human beings who is haunted by the past, imprisoned by regrets and the plague of
What if
?

Yet as the years went past, he felt himself getting no better. The pain was gone, but not the ache.

Is she more beautiful still
? he could not help but wonder, and,
Perhaps she is calmer, perhaps she is less frightened
. The thoughts and memories and desires returned to him on their own, as if they had achieved some enspiriting and now moved in the world with their own clockwork logic, arising and sleeping and then arising again, searching him out and intersecting with him for a while, then departing, yet returning: not just at dawn and dusk, but at any odd time of the day. And he began, finally, to understand that he was going to have to try to set the weight of her aside or be crushed, that he could go no further without attempting that: but that he would not let go of the old weight of her without attempting to find some new weight to carry.

I want one more chance
, Richard told himself. The Sierra Occidentals meant nothing to him, were insufficient as a substitute for passion—they had never meant anything to him—and so it seemed to him therefore that there was no choice but to backtrack to the last place on the path where anything had mattered to him, and to begin anew.

 

Here, too, in Mexico, the earth began to cave beneath the oilmen's weight, and their consumption. By Richard's eighth year, enough oil and gas had been pulled out from below, and enough water had been mined to use for the manufacture of all the various drilling fluids, that, as in Odessa, the desert floor began to sag and buckle in places.

Pipelines ruptured and sprayed fountains of flame a hundred feet into the air, and pooled blackish-green oil across the desert, creating little lakes and ponds of oil. Red Watkins was kept busier than he'd ever been, racing from one location to another, shutting off pipelines and ordering backhoes to dig up and refit the broken lines. Bulldozers shoved the oil-sodden earth into huge piles, blackened cone-shaped mountains appearing incongruously out in the center of the desert, with the tangled pipes still protruding from those piles, and then the workers ignited them, where the burning oil-sand would go on to smolder for years, clouding the desert sky with ribbons and tendrils of black smoke, and the odor of burning tires.

It was abysmal, none of the geologists were happy about it, but it was the cost of doing business, they said; the price of the world's growing appetite for their product. “The blood of the past,” Sy Craven called it.

It seemed to Richard that he began to lose his nerve. He dreamed some nights that the ground he was walking upon was collapsing, insufficient to hold even his own insignificant weight. In the dreams, he usually fell in only up to his waist or his armpits, and was able to crawl out, though there were also dreams in which he fell endlessly, fell all the way into wakefulness, landing with a shout and finding himself sitting up in bed in the bunkhouse with his heart sore and raw from having pounded so hard.

It would take him several minutes to calm and convince himself, in the darkness, that he had indeed not fallen off the face of the earth—had not been swallowed and consumed by the thing he had spent the last many years pursuing—and he would sit there for a while longer, sweating and remembering the dream in its clarity, while surrounded by the snores of the other men.

Is this what it felt like to the great fish
? he wondered. Was there a moment of sudden illumination when it first found itself trapped in the last deep hole?

Was there immediate chagrin, or did the regret and despair seep into the fish day by day and hour by hour, as it waited for the executioner, George Waller, to appear?

 

There was a fracas, later that autumn, when Richard went to Sy Craven and informed him that he had decided to retire from the company; that he understood he would waive full benefits, that he was only fifteen months shy of being fully vested, and that rather than walking away with millions, he would be leaving with far less than that amount. His annual salary had been generous and adequate, and his expenses almost nil. He would have to work again someday, particularly back on the other side of the border, but not for a while; in his last eight years, he felt as if he had already worked a lifetime. He could devote himself to other pursuits. He could reconsider other, past desires. He felt that he was finally rested enough to do so—to reenter the past—and believed fully that he would do so, if only because that was what he had always done, all his life.

Is it always this way
? he wondered, staring out at the blackened and ruined landscape.
Does even a single scratch upon the surface reveal, almost always, the identical results, over and over again
? Despite the lessons of his profession, he did not want to believe this was true, and yet, too often, the evidence before him seemed incontrovertible.

Sy Craven cursed him, then pleaded with him, telling him he had built entire drilling programs around him. He offered him outlandish incentives, then cursed him again when he refused. The eight years, nearly nine, had been necessary, but had been too long already, there could be no comparison between them and the four months he had had with Clarissa. He dared not try to explain these things to the other geologists and engineers, but simply shook his head and said that his heart was no longer in it: and they, with their alcohol-shrunken livers and emphysemic lung-hackings, their goiters and syphilis and gout, only stared at him uncomprehendingly. George Waller was not-so-secretly thrilled, and winced when Sy Craven suggested that Richard consider it merely a leave of absence, that he take some time off to do whatever he felt he needed to do, and then come back tan and rested and ready.

Only Red Watkins among them seemed to understand. With his rheumy eyes and rickety teeth, his shallow, labored breathing and otherwise-fading body, he regarded Richard with a mixture of surprise and respect that encouraged Richard to keep to his decision and to tell Sy Craven that no, it would not be a leave of absence, that it would be the real thing.

Richard thought that Craven was going to strike him then, but instead he simply cursed again and then turned his back on him and left, walking out of the room before Richard could—and disbelieving at the folly he had witnessed, George Waller followed quickly, shaking his head in delighted confirmation at this final revelation of the younger man's instability: and Richard smiled and waved goodbye to him, knowing that George Waller could easily spend the next ten years berating him to Sy Craven, and redefining his success into failure, even as the desert around them continued to collapse beneath the weight of all indications to the contrary.

It was the worst and most shocking thing any of them could imagine—many of them wondered afterward if Richard had been ill, or if there had been a death or illness in his family, or if—as George Waller continued to suggest—he was suffering some sort of breakdown, some collapse of nerve. Among them all, only Red Watkins remained nonjudgmental, and his firm, gnarly handshake seemed to Richard to be more than approving.

Richard didn't think the car he'd arrived in almost a decade earlier would survive the journey back, and Sy Craven wouldn't let him buy one of the company jeeps, so Red Watkins had to drive him north to the border crossing where Richard could then catch a bus to Texas.

The two men drove through the darkness—Craven had refused to let Red Watkins take off any time from work, so that he'd had to leave at night, like a truant schoolboy rather than an aging man, in order to be back by daylight.

As they drove, Red Watkins told Richard about the brief period of time before he'd begun work in the oilfields, his first twenty years. He had learned a lot and seen a lot and had no regrets, he said—in many ways, he believed that he had been made for the oilfield, that no profession could have suited him better—but that he did wonder sometimes, especially now that he was dying, about the path he had not chosen, the other path, and where it might have led.

It made him feel lonely, he said, as if there was some other part of himself out there that he had never known, or had known ever so briefly, but then abandoned, and which judged him, somehow, for that abandonment.

“You could come on across with me,” Richard said, and Red Watkins shook his head and said that Richard didn't understand, that that path and that life had died long ago, and that there was no way to reclaim it now even if he'd wanted to. The gravel road turned briefly to pavement, and glittered in the headlights with flecks of dark silica. A hundred yards of pavement, as if from this point forward, the way for all travelers would be easier, faster.

The two men stepped out of the jeep and Red Watkins handed Richard the watch taken from the great fish's belly and then did a rare thing for the old man, and embraced him. He wished him good luck. “You're going back because of a woman, aren't you?” Red asked, and Richard nodded and said that he was, and that if it worked out, and Red ever wanted to look him up, he would be in a place called Odessa.

He watched the younger man for a moment and tried to remember what it had been like to still be between the past and the future, and with the luxurious buffer between the two: able to go back and look for the lost pieces of a life, if one desired, or able to forge on ahead into the future, hungry and eager and unafraid, and unweary.

“Good luck,” he said again, and watched as the younger man turned and walked across the bridge, back into the country of his youth, and with so much treasure abandoned behind.

Behind him, Richard heard Red Watkins laugh out loud. It was not a mean or sarcastic laugh, but a laugh of plain happiness. Richard heard it clearly, but did not turn back around and look. It was dark on the bridge and the stars above were bright. The river glinted silver, far below, and he felt a brief wave of vertigo, but there would be no more dreams of falling. He gripped the watch in his pocket and in that darkness felt the thud of each second, each coil-spring tremor, ticking within its case.

1976

 

T
HE YOUNG GIRL
who was Richard's daughter, Annie, and whom he had no idea even existed, was living with the aging, faltering Marie, who, in the last several years, had been visited increasingly by Mr. Herbert Mix. (Whenever Mix addressed these visits to anyone, he acknowledged that he was “calling on” Marie. The farther Marie fell toward physical ruin—her long years at the salt mines overtaking her—the more she seemed to be an object of interest to Herbert Mix, who, to his credit, was drawn not just to the physical spectacle of her mortal flesh—her skin growing thinner and thinner, her frail old-woman's bones becoming nearly as pronounced as some of those in the skeletons he had spent his life collecting—but attracted also to her calm and endearing nature, her steadfastness.)

He admired the way she had taken on the task of raising the orphan girl in a swelter of Bible-belting fundamentalism, despite her not being an enthusiast of that sect, and of her commitment to be as good a mother as she could to the young girl, despite her advancing age and limitations.

In his later years, Herbert Mix, no Holy Roller himself, had taken to perusing the Bible, as fascinated by some of the sagas of wealth and apocalypse in Revelations as might be a young boy with a stack of action comics; and he had come to think of both the old woman and the young girl as being Ruthian, capable of, and even prone to, eloquent declarations of devotion. As if the two had been shaped for each other from the beginning. It was not that way at all; but in their isolation, they found themselves crafted into the closest of partners.

Together, the three of them were not so much like a family as a band or clan that gathered occasionally, reassembling in need or opportunity—but the two of them, Marie and Annie, had become like a family over the years, knit more closely than anything Annie would ever have known with her mother, the flight-driven Clarissa, and closer than anything Marie had ever known out at Juan Cordona Lake, or even among the peach orchards of her own childhood.